How White My Shirts Could Be

If marketing has no persuasive power on people you know, why is it considered so effective-- and so fearful?

Thirty isn't a big birthday, but 25 is. Twenty-one could be, 18 almost certainly will be. Forty-five or 50 is massive, depending on who you ask, and 65 is probably the biggest birthday of all. I'm talking about "demographic cohorts," the ways market researchers typically slice up audiences, and as I approach 35 I'm glumly aware that I'm hitting a demographic barrier.

Two days after this piece gets published, in fact, I will slip over the line, ceasing to meaningfully share opinions with the hungry intellects of the 25-34 demographic and having more in common with the cosy certainties of 35-44. The 18-24 year olds, for so long envied neighbors, will be red-shifted into a baffling mass. It could be worse: Enter the dreaded 65+ cohort and many research firms politely exclude you from surveys. The baby boomers, in other words, are about to start dropping off the data map.

Asking "what do people think?" is the public role of market research, but prior to that is always another question: "Whose opinions count, and for how much?" In fact, though I'll drink a toast on Sunday to my new demographic, I may have little to worry about: cuts of data based purely on age are seen as rather crude and old-fashioned now. Marketers prefer "lifestages" like buying a house or having kids. But hold on-- I've gone through both of those in the past 18 months, too. And if anything, I've been listening to a wider mix of music since I became a Dad-- more minimal techno, more global pop, more harsh or noisy stuff. That can't be normal for my lifestage, can it?

Research has an answer to that, too-- "attitudinal segmentation," grouping people by how they think as well as what they do. I'm sure some study out there has defined and valued a segment of parents who react to responsibility by embracing fringe culture that much more fiercely. And if they have, the marketers have got me-- except my favorite album last year was by Britney Spears. Ha! I revel in my unpredictability! Now to go out and buy more stuff.

Speaking as a marketer myself, I've noticed that most people who think of themselves as independent-minded-- which actually just means "most people"; it's rare to self-identify as a sheep-- have a paradoxical approach to my noble discipline. However they define it, they're fairly sure it doesn't work on them but they're equally convinced of its effectiveness on a lot of other people-- generally the ones they don't know. This goes double for people who virulently hate marketing: Attacks on it tend to assume it's fearfully effective and insidious. (Incidentally, if anyone reading this has ever trotted out that Bill Hicks quote, please kill yourself. Or, I don't know, stub your toe or something.)

The only people who think marketing is more effective than its haters do are marketers themselves, or at least those with blogs or books to sell, who whip up a dizzying froth of new mantras and principles all of which might unlock the secrets of the consumer mind: Blue Ocean Strategy, The Satisfaction of Enough, The Twelve Keys, The Twenty-Two Immutable Laws. It's an industry addicted to self-propagating sloganeering nonsense like a bizarro world version of the Chinese Communist Party. (One of the top titles on Amazon is actually called the Little Red Book of Selling.)

But if marketing's black persuasive arts are so effective, how come they only seem to work on those mysterious other people, the ones buying Leona Lewis or Daughtry or Vampire Weekend or Hannah Montana records (delete according to preference)? Partly it's a matter of perspective-- as my attempts to wriggle out of my demographic destiny attest, you can nearly always find something that makes you an individual, while judging people you don't know on minimal data. Partly it's a matter of taste: If we simply can't empathize with someone else's opinions, why not assume that it's not really them making those choices? Marketers themselves don't help by being so keen to proclaim the discipline's effectiveness-- it's wise to remember that the industry is extremely insecure and that many Marketing Directors are under boardroom siege, constantly harried by CEOs or heads of finance for not being able to show enough "return on investment."

But saying all that, there's also a sense in which it's true that marketing persuades other people but not you. The purported benefit to the consumer of most commercial communication is that it's a shortcut for thought, a way of reaching an opinion without doing the hard work: if you had the time to make an informed decision, it would be this. Marketing either provides information to speed that decision, or gives you easily deciphered signals to make the general ground rules you've worked out easier to follow: it's fashionable, it's a big name, it's a local brand, it's ethical, it's for "people like me."

The more involved you are in a particular category-- the more time you'd give yourself to make that decision-- the more obnoxious the idea of taking those shortcuts becomes, and the more obvious marketing ploys seem to you. Music is an area where a lot of its consumers are terribly heavily involved, so music marketing is particularly fraught. As the Fairytale In the Supermarket blog put it last summer, "I don't really have guilty pleasures but honestly, the closest I come is occasionally when I like something and I feel like I am TOTALLY the intended audience. Like if I find myself enjoying some new indie rock record and I feel like I'm fitting into a perfect marketing profile (overeducated, underemployed, clad in the requisite thrift store t-shirt, etc.) for the new insert-name-here album."

This was certainly a feeling I recognized-- because I think a lot about music I'm more alert than usual to when someone thinks they're pushing my buttons. In general, you notice and evaluate marketing efforts for the stuff you care about, and ignore it for the things you don't: the effect is that you see more clearly what everyone else is "falling for" while yourself slipping between researchers' generalizations. But to assume that this makes you more resistant to marketing is the same kind of perspective error as standing in fog and thinking the five meters around you that you can see are somehow actually clear. The world isn't divided into free thinkers and mindless herds-- everyone knows when they're being spun a line, they just don't always worry about the same spinners you do. The upside is that marketing's effectiveness can become starkly reduced when it's addressing the people who are highly involved in what's being sold: a limitation which reduces it, in my mind at least, from bogeyman to background noise.